The Guardian view on a Conservative crisis: one of the Tories’ own making | Editorial

The 2016 Brexit vote has exposed divisive contradictions at the heart of the ruling party. But its roots lie in the disruptive form of globalisation promoted by the Tories and New Labour

The Conservatives’ factional politics are now so monumentally petty that it cannot get a party conference app to work, let alone organise Brexit or, heaven forbid, respond to a deep global emergency. The divisive contradictions at the heart of Tory politics will be laid bare in the days ahead. Conservatives are for free trade, but against the free movement of people. The party condemns populist politics unless it is fomented by, and on behalf of, the rich and powerful. The Tories are supposed to be good at capitalism, but some have spent months planning to wreck it. Another section of the party is delusional, arguing that the hardest of Brexits will allow Britain to flourish. It won’t.

There’s little doubt that the Brexit referendum energised the conservative base of the Tory party, but it also shattered its unity. This crisis in Conservatism can trace its roots beyond the 2016 vote, to the disruptive form of globalisation promoted by Tories and New Labour that eviscerated habits of life, work and family. This transformed British politics from a “class-based” party system – where Labour drew support from the poorly educated and the poor – to today’s elite electorates, where highly educated voters now strongly support Labour while the rich back the Conservatives. Older people have shifted to the Tories. This is countered by a deep hostility of the young to the right and Brexit. This intensifying of support in certain strata of society has been described by the economist Thomas Piketty as a process that leads to a “Brahmin left” and a “merchant right” dominating western politics. Whatever their differences, both groups remain attached to liberalism: Brahmins prize its social aspects; merchants, the economic. The question for the main political parties is how to attract the left-behind voters, taken for granted in recent years by a complacent belief that whatever inequalities existed could be managed. They were not, and politics is reaping the whirlwind.

Continue reading...

from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2zHcYMh